Make referrals mandatory: Sangakkara

Sri Lanka skipper Kumar Sangakkara felt it was time the ICC made the Umpire Decision Review System (UDRS) mandatory for all Test matches.

Bowing to India’s resistance to using the UDRS, Sri Lanka Cricket decided not to use technological aid for indecisive umpiring decisions despite the ICC recently authorising the home boards to decide on UDRS’ use in consultation with the visiting board. Interestingly, India have never featured in a Test series involving UDRS ever since it affected them a great deal during their series in Sri Lanka two years ago.

“As players we are very much in support of the Decision Review System (DRS). I was under the impression that the ICC has set the standards on this by saying that everyone should use the DRS system. I think last year in India also, the entire team felt a little hard done by when we came to know that we couldn’t have the DRS system,” Sangakkara said.

“The role that ICC has to play here is to make sure that all boards are bound to have the DRS system rather than when one side refuses, the other side can’t enforce the DRS system under current playing conditions.”

India skipper M.S. Dhoni, however, justified his team’s stand due to lack of a foolproof system. “DRS is still not 100 per cent correct. We have seen that inspite of having the DRS, not everything goes correct. Most of the teams have played a series under the DRS, so it is important now to come up with a foolproof plan and see what exactly works,” Dhoni said.

“In a bat-pad scenario, hot spot really works. Even on lbw decisions, we need to have something like that. If everything follows in that way, we can just have a camera instead of an umpire.”